Tag Archives: Current Events

Having to do with the here and now

Sarah H. Foxwell, Age 11, Murdered

This was a Christmas headline nobody wanted to read.  The news story unfolded all too predictably, but despite that predictability–maybe because of it–the story caused a strong reaction in anyone who read it.

Except me.  I was characteristically unmoved, able to maintain my objectivity and intellectual distance; that is, until the news story revealed a single salient detail.  The girl’s toothbrush was found in the suspect’s car.

Of course, this fact probably was included as damning circumstantial evidence against the accused, but for me, this mundane detail somehow broke through my customary emotional distance.  It brought me into that house on that night.  It increased the immediacy of the victimization involved in the crime, the level of violence of the young girl’s abduction and murder.

If she had simply been overpowered and dragged from her bedroom, as I initially had believed, it would have been bad enough.  The detail of the toothbrush, however, leads to a different vision of the crime.  Rather than an act of savage, unreasoning violence, the kidnapping obviously unfolded at leisure, with ample forethought and scheming.  As part of this pattern, the perpetrator created the illusion of concern for the girl’s welfare.  He allowed her to retrieve her toothbrush. Continue reading

The Founders – Not Godly, But Wise

Tonight’s A Prairie Home Companion impressed me as a pure and joyful celebration of the election of Barack Obama–perhaps the best expression of that joy that I have heard thus far.  In the opening minutes, Jearlyn Steele and Garrison Keilor teamed up for a rousing rendition of “America the Beautiful,” and as they sang, I found myself thinking back, impressed at the genius of our Founding Fathers.  Against some pretty steep odds, and after an uncomfortably long period of foundering, the ship of state has righted itself, but not through any random miracle or massive act of violence; it has righted itself through the foresight and devotion to reason shown by that intrepid group of 18th century philosopher-poets in their attempt to create a utopia and bequeath it to the generations yet to come.

If you need something to cheer you up, you really should hear the show, and it might be available by the time you read this.  Check HEREContinue reading

Where Is Your God Now, Libbie?

Having plumbed a new low in North Carolina politics–and, let’s face it, a low in NC, the home of Jesse Helms, is by default, a national low–Elizabeth Dole has managed to lose her senate seat, perhaps primarily by accusing her opponent, Kay Hagan, of being (gasp) an atheist.

Well, in point of fact, she lost by merely occupying her senate seat instead of actually doing anything productive for the state and nation, and by being more closely associated with her husband’s home state of Kansas than with her native state.  But still, the political ad, which New York Magazine, in their supplement entitled “Our Super-duper, Ultrasimple Election-Watching Guide,” called “the single worst ad by any candidate in 2008″ did not help her desperate cause.

This development is really kind of encouraging to one who has lived in the state for almost 40 years–not that North Carolina political ads continue to be so debased as to leave only disgust in the minds and hearts of thinking people everywhere, but that this last foray into the muck has not succeeded in bringing victory.  This stuff usually works great here!  What happened? Continue reading

Good ol’ boy network? I hardly think so

The recent anti-élite campaign jargon of the McCain-Palin camp has made use of a most annoying–but ubiquitous–malapropism.  Palin, especially, refers rather often, and rather annoyingly, to the “good ol’ boy network.”  If anything could solidify one’s status as outside of the élite, this off-target utterance would be that thing.  See, there is a world, or at least a continent, of difference between a “good old boy” and an “old boy,’ and rest assured, it is the old boys who have the network to which one really wants to belong.

You’d never be able to buy your way in to either network, however.  An “old boy” is a graduate of one of England’s “public” or independent schools, someplace like Eton College.  While good ol’ boys have quite the little network of their own, membership will cost one very little.  All one has to do is be among the fourth or fifth generation of a respectable, church-going family living in some region of the rural south, and you’re well on your way.  True, this membership will only take one only just so far.  Still, A “good ol’ boy” need not have graduated from anywhere, even an American public high school.  One need only possesses a spectrum of traits, which make one worthy of the title, rendered somewhat lovingly in one’s absence.

The term signifies one’s apparent humility, one’s apparent basic decency, as well as one’s obvious tendency to withhold any forthright opinion on any particular topic in the presence of strangers.  This is the central trait of the good ol’ boy, and one he holds in common with many of his upper-crust British cohort.  He leaves people free to hold, and even to express, the most outlandish positions on matters many and various.  He’ll never tell anyone they’re wrong; he’ll never tell people what he thinks about that topic, but you will never win him over to your line of thinking, no matter how solid your argument.  Oh, you will think he agrees with you, but you will want to be a fly on the wall when next he gets together with others of his ilk to know the truth.

Although he is a man of no apparent opinions in the presence of people he doesn’t know that well, one finds he is also a man of rigidly held, dogmatic beliefs once one gets to know him.  It is this trait, and perhaps this trait alone, which he shares in common with the old boys of Britain.  It is this trait, perhaps, that serves as a marker of his common heritage with the ruling élite of the United Kingdom.

On a related note, one has noticed how natives of tiny, overpopulated island nations have a way of taking politeness to the next level.  Look at Japan and England, for example.  I mean, they come by this trait naturally, it seems, and it is easy to see why.  How uncomfortable would it be to spend time with someone once one had established a source of disagreement with him or her?  Best, then, to keep all such disagreements from ever surfacing, to keep one’s own counsel, to state forthright opinion only among those one knows already hold the same opinion.  It only makes sense.

300,000 hits for “I can haz”?

wet-madI don’t know what got into me, exactly, but on a whim, I entered “I can haz” into a Google search. I guess I was becoming aware how often the phrase appears as I surf around. I wondered how pervasive it had become, how much cultural penetration it had achieved. Google came up with almost 300,000 references to the phrase, a statistic that gave me pause. (Check it now. Maybe the total has gone up since the date of this post.)

This “cultural penetration” thing is interesting, though, and we’ve all experienced the phenomenon, usually as the uncomfortable feeling that comes from being with someone who is just picking up on something that we have become tired of ourselves. It’s like you got penetrated a long time ago, but this person has just now gotten nailed. What explains that? Perhaps he was hiding in some cultural backwater? Perhaps he has a life?

But ah, the fads: They begin; they gain currency; they end. But not really, huh? Maybe they just keep penetrating like the old television broadcasts of I Love Lucy, which are some 57 light years out in space now. Bless her, Lucy has been hurtling through the galaxy at the speed of light as long as I have been alive. Some far-off alien is just now saying, “So turn off the conveyor belt already!” Continue reading

Dolly Lama?

The current Dalai LamaWith the Dalai Lama so much in the news lately, I am struck by how many commentators mangle the pronunciation of his title. I mean, he’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner (1989), for crying out loud. Can we get this right?

It seems that many of them pronounce it “DOLL-lee LAH-muh.” The more approved western pronunciation, however, seems to be something along the lines of “DOLL-eye LAH-mah” (see the resources below). The man himself, heard in recent interviews, seems to say something like “dah-LA-la-ma,” almost as if it were one word with the accent on the second syllable.

One particularly frustrating instance of this confusing pronunciation phenomenon occurred in an interview (3/26/08) on NPR‘s Fresh Air. In her discussion with Pico Iyer, author of The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Terry Gross continued to call the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists worldwide the “Dolly Lama” despite the fact that the interviewee, a man acquainted with the Dalai Lama for over 30 years, kept pronouncing it in the approved western fashion.

The natural question is, “What’s going on here?”

Continue reading